Apple to sell ‘personal cloud’ products instore from June

Promise Technologies has announced Apple will exclusively sell its Apollo ‘personal cloud’ appliances instore from June 7.

The product itself is billed by Promise as a safer way to share and save photos, videos and files, which can be uploaded from anywhere in the world through the Apollo Cloud App which are then stored on a physical device which is owned by the customer. While the device does allow customers to utilize the internet to upload files and data, the offering is seemingly very similar to an external hard drive.

“Promise has a relentless commitment to innovating new solutions that improve how we live and work,” said HC Chang, GM of Promise Technology APAC. “Apollo is our latest innovation, however, it is just the beginning as we are looking at building a whole new line of solutions for the IoT market. We are looking forward to showcasing Apollo to the many users passionate about technology and we are excited to hear their innovative ideas on what the next generation of Apollo should offer.”

The news was made public by the Promise Technologies team at Computex in Taiwan, and to-date there has been no comment from Apple.

Apple has been making efforts in recent months to bolster its position in the cloud marketplace, and this latest effort would appear to be a move towards the consumer market. The company does already play a role within the consumer world; iCloud is a similar offering to Dropbox; though the Promise technology would appear to an alternative for the security conscious customers. In the enterprise world, the company has recently announced a partnership with SAP, to develop iOS apps based on the SAP HANA cloud platform, as well as entering the e-Health market with the launch of CareKit, an open-source software framework.

The introduction of products geared towards the consumer market is not a new move for the industry, as there are already a number of tech giants fighting for market share. Statista estimates 1.74 billion people will be using personal cloud storage worldwide by 2017, with this number increasing to 2.04 billion in 2019.

Dropbox could generally be considered the market leader, announcing it had exceeded 500 million users in March, with Google’s Drive and Microsoft’s OneDrive, also offering similar services. The Promise solution would appear to be a private-cloud-twist for consumers, with increased security claims as well as a customer’s maintaining oversight of their own data, though it is ultimately a ‘on premise’ product, as the company makes no mention of cloud back-up storage. As mentioned before, it would appear to be very similar to an external hard drive, with the added benefits of internet-enabled uploading features.

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